It takes two to tango
by boiled eggs
Summary: Ginny sees something she didn't want to see, and after twelve years, finds out something she didn't want to know about her happy marriage. (I used to go by the name Siriusly.Mooni)


A/N: ayo, this is my first story, so i hope y'all like it- leave me reviews? pwease? .

erm...a disclaimer: i don't own harry potter, cuz' if i did, i would be rolling in the dough man, rolling.

She steps into the corridor, which is all at once very dim and very bright, its broken lamplight badly mimicking the passage of the sun through the clouds outside. Stepping through the piles of broken glass that litter the walkway, and covering her face from the smell of piss and old beer, she walks quickly and delivers a neat knock to the door in front of her- apt 2A. There's a familiar noise- but it's too familiar- she knows what the sounds of bodies meshing is, what the sound of love is. She inhales sharply- she better be wrong, she better damn well be wrong. She cracks the door. She wants to be wrong; she really, really wants to be wrong. She wants to trust in her husband, in their vows. She peers through the crack and_ fuckfuckfuck _she isn't wrong. There's her husband, with his rough black hair and green eyes that are squeezed shut from concentration, and he's balls deep in-and this makes her want to laugh and cry and scream too- a very willing, gasping, _pleading_ Draco Malfoy.

She watches them for a while, the push and pull and the thrust and she hates them for a while, and she loves them too- loves how they love each other. She watches her husband putting his all into a criminal; a death eater; a rapist and a murderer in a way that he's never even endeavored to so much as touch her with, and she watches how Malfoy stares at her husband in a way that is simultaneously hungry and adoring. She stares through the crack in the door way in the forgotten, disgusting hallway and thinks of how life is unfair- that Malfoy, the disgraced prince of wizarding society, reduced to living in a flat ready to be condemned because no one else would take him, and that she, with her mink coats and Egyptian cotton sheets and fancy robes and 17 bed roomed home with ebony hardwood flooring could be in competition for a man only she deserved, and she could…._had_ lost. She fingers her wedding ring, covered in jewels and slathered in wealth and suddenly she wishes she could fling it to the heavens- to the bottom of the sea because sure she has the promise and the wealth and the evidence on her finger, but she doesn't have his heart; that is very clear.

They begin to move faster; they're closer to their finish now. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there, watching them- it could have been hours, days, but all she can think of is how perfect they look- one pale as milk and the other as golden as sun. A sudden gasp, a name ripping from a pale throat is all it takes, and they fall together, her husband pressing kisses all over the face of the death eater, the disgusting one who's torn her life apart and given her something to ponder all at the same time. She wants to leave, or to thrust herself into the room and scratch and scream and absolutely _ruin_ them, but something stops her. The voice of Draco motherfucking husbandstealer Malfoy is scratchy from moaning and shouting but his words are clear. "We can't….we can't keep doing this…Harry, we can't." His voice is soft with something that might be pain. And Harry, her beautiful, terrible Harry, he laughs, rough and low and still tinged with sex.

"And why not? Concerned about my wife?" he says, his face betraying his amusement. "She's nothing." The words echo in her head- she is nothing, nothing, _nothing _to him and it hurts so badly she can barely breathe. She knows he loves Malfoy but some part of her hoped that maybe she was reading him wrong, getting him confused. She knows better now, and she waits for them to laugh together, to seal in her pain. But Malfoy does not laugh- he frowns at Harry and the disapproving expression creases his brow.

"Exactly Harry- your wife. That's who she is, that's what she is, and that's who she's been for the last twelve years- _your wife_. I can't sit by and watch you fuck me and love me and go home to her anyway. Don't you think she knows? She has to know and if she does then, goddammit, then you're hurting her." Ginny wants to laugh all of a sudden; Draco Malfoy, the silver tongued snake, guilty? Was it even possible? Harry's expression changes from amused to annoyed as Malfoy speaks- it's the same expression he uses when she nags him to do interviews for the prophet or the like and she instantly knows that Malfoy's said this to him before. "Is my darling, my darliiiiing Draco feeling guilty? Maybe wishing I'd just leave her? Don't use compassion to hide what you really want- you couldn't care less about how my wife felt- it's me you want, all me." She recoils slightly when Malfoy's face curls into a devious little smirk, and he whispers to Harry: "So am I enough to make you leave her? Little….old…me?" Harry groans between each word that Malfoy speaks and she realizes that Harry's still inside the disgusting slytherin (that husband stealer), and it's another blow to her pride- in the rare times they did still have sex, Harry would pull away from her afterward as though she was stricken with dragonpox or something else equally repulsive.

She waits for the verdict- she knows that he does not love her enough to stay truly hers, but does he hate her enough to leave? "Fine, fine- I'll leave her. It isn't as though there's any reason to stay with her anyway, that bitch." Ginny is surprised to find that tears spring to her eyes- she rather wished that he was finished being cruel. She sees Malfoy's face shift into a smile, wide and open and then he moves and kisses Harry, and the cycle begins again. She tears herself away from the doorframe- wobbly and blotchy faced, and does not bother to pull in the door- instead she stumbles down the sketchy hallway and apparates home.

She arrives in their bedroom- the house of her love, of her hard work, the proof of their devotion to him carved in every mantelpiece, every portrait. In her tired mind she cannot fathom, cannot place when she became so repulsive to Harry. She has spent every day loving him, pushing him, and being his backbone, his rock. And for what? Her house; her money- every bit of it is useless for the man who owns it all (and her heart too) doesn't even give a damn. She walks idly past cream colored wallpaper and gold gilded picture frames to her sitting room, where the majority of all her time is spent, and stares at it, examining it. She realizes that although the room is full of her- it is empty of Harry, her Harry, her love and her strength and her motivation. She tears through the house, looking for any sign of him, any sign of their marriage, of their so-called storybook romance. In three hours, all she finds is a dusty wedding photo, and a pair of socks with red snitches. The inhabitants of the photo stand apart where they once embraced- the male looking firmly out of the side of the picture as though he waits for someone else, and the female engorged with her own shoes.

She wants to be angry- truly she does. But she cannot find her fire-red anger, her feelings of bitter betrayal. For if Harry has done wrong in moving to the arms of another- and oh yes, yes he has, then it is also she who has driven him away with her false motions of love and attraction- she wanted a man who did not exist, and so she took what he could give- money. And with that money, she gave them a home, in all its splendor and beauty, and took away their feelings, sapped out their emotions and left them as pretty as a picture but as dry as an empty corn husk. Harry has done wrong- this is very true- but to use the muggle phrase, 'it takes two to tango.'


End file.
